"The rule of centralized state and bureaucratic machines is one of those things that the cultural reproduction apparatus teaches people to accept as 'natural' or 'inevitable' ('it must be more efficient, or it wouldn’t be this way;' 'the people in charge make these rules for a reason'). But in fact it is very much the result of human agency. In the U.S., it was deliberate collusion between the state and big business, especially in the 1850s and the Gilded Age, to set up a centralized corporate economy." (02/22/12)